


Cannibal Fight Club

by elvisqueso



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Alternative Universe - Fight Club, Do not talk about Cannibal Fight Club, Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-15
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-15 20:19:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1317892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elvisqueso/pseuds/elvisqueso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I am Will's Crushing Disappointment.</p><p>A Hannibal/Fight Club drabble</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Hannibal Lecter cooks me a dinner of slow-roasted flank in a kind of red wine sauce and those floral vegetable arrangements I think are stupid but don’t mention; then he’s got a linoleum knife to my abdomen, telling me he’s considering eating my heart and that he’s impressed by my courage. I’m wondering why, specifically, it was a linoleum knife he kept in his desk drawer.

If you want to gut something, alive, the best way to do it is to hang it upside-down so the blood pressure swells in the head and chest and the subject can stay conscious. Get a nice, sharp blade with an even curve and cut from sternum up to the crotch. The organs will fall down in the cavity, be careful to take the lower intestines and squeeze feces out into a separate bag. Keep a bowl underneath to catch all the blood. Keep the blade angled so you don’t damage the organs and ruin everything. I know this because Hannibal knows this.

Hannibal asks me how that makes me _feel_.

 

This is how I meet Hannibal Lecter: There is a murder in the middle of a field out in Minnesota. Minnesota is a large, plain place with a lot of trees and lakes and not much else. Now it has a girl impaled on a stag head sitting like some kind of token in the middle of nowhere. How anybody found it was anybody’s guess.

I go back to the field a day after they have the girl and the taxidermy head sent to Quantico and Hannibal’s there, pacing between the trees. I ask him what the Hell he’s doing there, this is a fucking crime scene.

He just kinda smiles at me and tells me there is a specific mathematical ratio for the distances between the trees in the area. Measured in approximate paces, he says, the ratio is on a curve of 1:.64. The Greeks call it the Golden Ratio. Hannibal is full of useful information.

He says if you draw it out as an aerial plan, then connect the trees you’ll get a Fibonacci Spiral. I say it sounds like bullshit.

Hannibal Lecter has a doctorate in medicine and psychology. Jack wants me to have a doctor while he sends me after monsters.

I hate doctors. Any kind of doctor. Doctors like to poke at things nobody wants poked. Turn your head and cough while I squeeze your testicles. If I dig my finger into your spleen, does it hurt? How does that make you feel?

Psychologists are the worst, though. Dr. Frederick Chilton administrates the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane. It’s a wonder anything ever gets done around there. He’s the kind of man who puts too much emphasis on the _s_ ’s in his sentences. How Chilton would just love to get inside my head.

And how does that make you _feel_?

Hannibal Lecter says Chilton is a leaky colonoscopy bag.

The kabuki murder in Minnesota is a copy of another killer Jack wants me to find, gift-wrapped like a courting present. Some guy’s killing college girls; wind-chafed ones with auburn hair. I can’t sleep nights and when I try I see the guy’s shadow across the room from me. Sometimes I tell him I can help him, that I know what he’s doing and that I can help make it better. Sometimes I just stare.

In the morning I feel like shit and Hannibal Lecter is at my motel room door with a lunch bag and a thermos.

Hannibal Lecter says I’m a mongoose.

We go around to construction sites because Beverly Katz found a shred of pipe metal on another body’s clothes. Garret Jacob Hobbs never left an address on his resignation letter.

Jack Crawford has me talking to Alana Bloom, because the other option he gives me is Chilton and he’s a leaky colonoscopy bag.

Jack doesn’t know Hannibal. Hannibal has no interest in knowing Jack, but he calls him Uncle.

 

Garrett Jacob Hobbs knew we were coming. I don’t know how, but he did and now there’s a dying woman on the porch of his house and I don’t know how to stop the bleeding. Today is not my day.

Inside the house Garrett Jacob Hobbs has his wind-chafed, auburn haired daughter in his arms with a hunting knife to her neck and suddenly he’s a mass of swarming mots. I see the knife move and suddenly I’ve shot him. He doesn’t go down, so I shoot him nine more times. I’ve suddenly lost faith in 33mm pistols.

Wind-chafed daughter is bleeding on the floor and I don’t know how to stop the bleeding. I look over and Hobbs is grinning.

“See? See.”

I see a Hell of a lot of blood.

Hannibal finally decides to come in and help the fuck out because he’s a doctor and that’s what he’s supposed to do. He knows how to stop the bleeding and I sit there like a lump of useless shaking because I just shot a man ten times. Today is not my day.

And how does that make you _feel_?

I feel like I should have stuck to fixing boat motors.

 

Hannibal Lecter and I sit for a long, long time in Abigail Hobb’s hospital room before the nurses kick us out and Alana calls me to ask if I’m okay and if I want a referral for the psych eval Jack wants me to have. I don’t want anybody inside my head, I say. Hannibal says he can rubber stamp me if I need it.

I am the mongoose with a burr on its ass.

I get Hannibal to come to the bar with me and we talk about stress and paternal feelings. He asks me to punch him.

What?

“I want you to punch me as hard as you can.” We’ve had a few rounds and I suspect this might be the ether talking.

I tell him I’m not going to do that.

“I’m asking you as a friend: punch me as hard as you possibly can.”

Not in here.

We go out into the parking lot. I ask him if I should punch him in the gut or in the face.

“Wherever you want to.” He’s grinning like an idiot and suddenly I really, really want to hit him.

I swing hard at his ear. My fist stings like a mother-fucker and I can only imagine how much Hannibal’s ear hurts. Shit I’m sorry.

“Good.” Hannibal drives right into me and winds me. I’m down on the ground before I know what’s happening.

How does that make you feel?

I am the mongoose in the snake pit.

The next few minutes is nothing but fists and teeth and blood and we’re sitting behind the bar next to a dumpster throwing empty beer bottles. Garrett Jacob Hobbs is a bloody corpse and I hit him square in the face with a Budweiser. Hannibal says we should do this more often.

 

I know exactly what kind of crazy I am. Everyone’s a certain kind of crazy, but only the ones who know exactly how they’re crazy end up in hospitals. Denial’s a funny thing that way.

If a man stands at the entrance of a retail store, the kind where they put the security monitor in plain view so you _know_ you’re being watched, and yells with his arms ecstatic that the Machine is the Vehicle and the Government is the Machine and that in the end it doesn’t matter anyway because the Vehicle is going to Die people think he’s crazy. But the man never considers that he might be crazy. He thinks he’s got a knowledge about the World and the Vehicle and that the security camera’s will send his message and someone else will see what he sees and maybe they’ll understand his knowledge, too. It’s not crazy like the kind you see on Fox News. It’s crazy like the truth is crazy.

Truth is a liquid thing, according to Hannibal. He’s a master of truth. Anything could be truth if you believe it enough. It’s a truth that sometimes I blink and end up somewhere else hours later. It’s a truth that what I do isn’t really ‘good’ for me. It’s a truth that I save lives.

I also end them in a strange way that keeps me from sleeping most nights. When I do there’s a big, black, feathered stag that stares at me and makes me wonder what other kind of crazy I am. I wake up and remember that I already know.

I am the mongoose under the house when the snakes slither by.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I probably won't do anything more with this, but I couldn't get the idea out of my head.
> 
> I am the mongoose with inadequate survival skills.
> 
>  
> 
> _Comments and constructive criticism are welcome, encouraged, and appreciated_


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I am Will's biting sense of betrayal

You wake up in New Jersey, in those blue pleather seats with “Economy Comfort” embedded in the head-rest. You wake up in Vermont or Georgia or Minnesota with bruises on your ass from sitting too long. You have the same brown, three hundred dollar briefcase as a hundred million other men with manila folders and copier paper bought at Office Max. Only a certain number of hundreds of men have clippings of case files with pictures, twenty of them, 8x10 and glossy with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one is, and maybe two more men have the same exact ones I do.

Serial killers are generally male, middle-aged, and white.

Say something about stereotypes and genotypes and racial trends. Post it on a social website and have ten thousand angry, white males, middle-aged, type loudly at you.

The levels of melatonin in your skin affect your behavior.

Or the color of your hair, or the year you were born, or the constellation you were born under. You are the lines on your hands, the street you grew up on, what your animal on the Chinese Zodiac is. You are the clothes you wear and the furniture you buy. The generic kidney pattern from 1963 on your walls. You are your Father and your Mother and your job and the money you make. You are the words that come out of your mouth and the pressure you put on any downward stroke of your pen. You are your sexual habits.

It’s a load of bullshit, but it’s what most people seem to believe.

Abel Gideon believed he was the Chesapeake Ripper.

Truth’s a funny, liquid, confusing thing.

The owner of the bar Hannibal and I pummeled each other outside of now lets us use the basement for weekly fights. It starts with a few extra people, loss of shirts and shoes. The number grows the next week and the next exponentially, logarithmically, until there’s a crowd dozens strong gathered outside the basement door after closing and Hannibal has to shout for them to clear a path for the man with the keys.

Release of endorphins, dopamine and serotonin and adrenaline, and soon the whole basement smells like blood and iron. Hannibal breaks a bottle of vodka on the floor and makes me watch the entropy of it all spilling into the drain. No matter what chaos you bring into the World, he says, it will always find a way back to itself. The fights are the same way, he says. He says it to the entire group therapy session amid the slapping of hands on skin and the crunching of bone on the cardboard separating bodies from concrete.

The fights are the same way; tomorrow, you will go home to your wives and your children and your jobs and there will be clockwork and there will be routine. Your wife will make the same casserole she’s made every week of every year you’ve been married to her. Your children will follow the rules the schools lay out for them and pattern their behavior the same way their classmates do. Nothing outside of this basement changes when we’re done. “If you want change,” Hannibal says, “You have to kill what’s normal about you.”

Abel Gideon killed his wife and her family at Thanksgiving. The turkey steaming on the table, a perfectly good pumpkin pie left to cool on the windowsill until the birds decimated it. Two years ago, Abel Gideon killed what was normal about him.

You’re not the Chesapeake Ripper, I say.

“I don’t have to prove who I am to you,” he says, and he saunters because there’s no reason not to.

Abel Gideon is not the Chesapeake Ripper, but he thinks he is. He tries to be.

He’s tried to be a lot of things, I imagine, and Hannibal stitches the gash in my cheek from last night’s fight therapy with a hot needle and thread.

I am the mongoose baiting the snake.

Jack aims to piss the Ripper off, well, he got what he wanted. He got Miriam Lass’s arm, cold from a meat freezer, poking his conscience while his wife tries to pretend she doesn’t have cancer.

Hannibal laughed when I told him what happened. His laugh sounds like a bull horn over whatever meat is sizzling in his frying pan. Hannibal is an excellent cook. Olive oil keeps butter from burning in the pan. Just a drizzle of it, throw in some oregano and thyme, rosemary and garlic. Pepper, just a dash. Let the meat simmer on low, sear it enough to keep the blood in. Blood’s where the flavor comes from.

What do we do, he asks, when we cut our thumbs on our mass produced copier paper and our manila folders?

He kisses his thumb, “We taste our own blood.”

Self-cannibalism. We do it every day.

Our blood, our cuticles, our saliva and our mucus. We cannibalize our words and our feelings. I can cannibalize emotion and thoughts and points of view. I’m such a special cannibal.

I am the mongoose with an identity crisis.

You have to kill what’s normal about you if you want change.

Not knowing who I am is becoming normal to me.

Abel Gideon goes down as Garrett Jacob Hobbs in the snow with blood spilling from his neck and I can see him choking while the World swirls and I fall asleep to Alana Bloom screaming something. I don’t want to get up just yet, Alana, just five more minutes, please.

I wake up to Hannibal opening some expensive Tupperware.

The Chinese say that silky chicken has healing properties other chickens don’t.

What a load of shit.

“I certainly hope it doesn’t taste like it.”

 

Wake up and you’re in Wolf Trap, Virginia. Your name is Will Graham.

Wake up and Abigail Hobbs is no longer with you.

Wake up and there’s blood on your hands and dirt on your feet and you’re at the sink retching and retching and retching.

Oh, God.

The World is spinning.

Oh, God.

Self-cannibalism. We do it every day.

Oh, God.

There’s an ear in your sink and you’re not retching anymore even though you want to.

In bars all over Maryland, spread out in a Fibonacci spiral, fight therapy takes the place of confession and pillow-talk. I don’t want to know who I am. I don’t want to know Garrett Jacob Hobbs or Abel Gideon or Hannibal Lecter. I don’t want to know Jack Crawford of the BAU or what the Golden Ratio of the Greek is.

All I want to know is the tearing of skin on teeth and what bone sounds like cracking on the concrete floors of bar basements. There are no names at Fight Therapy Anonymous. Every place has a different name for it. Fight Club, Brawlers Anonymous, Therapy for Bums. Some places get clever with anagrams.

I want to breathe smoke.

Hannibal drags me out from behind a dumpster and stuffs me in the trunk of his car.

I am the mongoose tight in the snake’s coils.

Hannibal Lecter tears gauze with his teeth and snaps on latex gloves filled with talcum powder.

It’s 2:43 AM. You’re in Baltimore, Maryland. Your name is Will Graham.

Are you sure?

“Do you want me to be?”

You’re trying to confuse me.

“What would be the point?”

Your fucking curiosity.

I want to shoot him in the face with a 55 mm slug. I want to break the skin of his lips on his own teeth and scream at him. I want to feel his chest heaving, struggling against my weight to suck in air. I want to breathe smoke and eat fire and I want him to see it. I want that fucking stag to see it, too, and who gives a fuck if anybody else sees me. I’m alive. I’m alive and this is real.

“You’re dreaming, Will.”

Don’t do this to me.

“Do you remember where you were? You’re dreaming.”

Don’t fucking lie to me.

“Where’s Abigail?”

Where’s our daughter?

“What have you done?”

We are her fathers, now.

“Who are you?”

I am the mongoose’s panic response.

Wake up and you’re in Minnesota.

Wake up and Abigail is your daughter and your sacrificial lamb. Why?

Kill what’s normal about you.

Abigail wasn’t normal. She knew that. You can’t be normal with fathers like us.

Abigail asked me what it was like to kill her dad. I lied to her. I lied because I thought I could help her be normal.

Nobody knows what normal is. That was Hannibal’s point, his design. Kill what’s normal when you can’t even identify it. How do you gauge it? By the possessions of your neighbors? By the standards of the Joneses or the Church? Do you measure normalcy in numbers on a chart after three hours of screening and MRI scans? Can normal be defined Universally? I can think too much and lose myself in my own head. Is that abnormal? Or is that just what can be normal for me?

Thousands of tabloid headlines screaming “Cannibal!” covered Abigail’s life and smothered her budding womanhood. Could that be normal for her? The man who killed her dad doesn’t know. The man who saved her life won’t tell.

He just wants to see what I will do.

I am the mongoose under the microscope, cosmetics in my eyes.

And I am very pissed off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, well...
> 
> I guess I couldn't leave this be, could I?

**Author's Note:**

> _Comments and constructive criticism are welcome, encouraged, and appreciated_


End file.
